Sandwich Pavilion: Timber Connection, Architectural Form and Building Method Discovery

Timber is a kind of structural material that has been widely used in building for thousands of years. It is liked by humans because it is light, strong, easy to process and eco-friendly. Currently, more techniques such as glulam, LVL, CLT and CNC technology are increasingly being used in the timber manufacturing process, making the structural system more diverse, lightweight and beautiful. However, those techniques often require bigger machines and more skilled workers. This makes the building process more expensive and difficult to be conducted by normal people.

In this thesis, the whole building process goes back to a simple, classic working environment, with a basic machine supply. It also tries to find a “sandwich” way to build a “complex” building with a simplified strategy in the whole building process. 

The “sandwich” system provides not only beauty in the architectural and structural logic with all components working with the same timber profile dimension, but also different layers of overlapping to bear different loads from the primary to the tertiary level of structure. It also combines the components with a kind of simple “screwing joint” to make the shape of those components as simple as possible. The number of customized metal components is also reduced in this system as well as its shape.

Based on this strategy, all components are made in the school workshop by mechanical or human-controlled machines. After that, the components are tested and assembled at school, then disassembled and packed onto transport. Finally, they end up with a “Forest Classroom” pavilion built in Papamoa, Tauranga on a selected site. This pavilion itself and the building process are the major part of this thesis, and the full record shows how the process is optimized and how real-life problems are solved.